The PIP (Project for Innovative Poetry) was created by Green Integer and its publisher, Douglas Messerli, in 2000. The Project publishes regular anthologies of major international poets and actively archives biographies of poets and listings of their titles.

April 27, 2009

Simon Vinkenoog

Simon Vinkenoog [Netherlands]1928-2009

Born in 1928, Simon Vinkenoog, like others of this volume, experienced as a teenager World War II and the German occupation. Like many of his generation he was drawn to Paris after the war, in the days when writing appeared as a subversive act. He worked in Paris for several years, keeping in close contact with artists such as Karel Appel, at whose exhibitions he recited his poems and prose. Here also he published a journal Blurb, in which he explained his ideas for a new order of the arts. His important anthology of poetry, Atonaal, became a major influence for experimental Dutch poets and others.

Returning the The Netherlands, Vinkenoog became involved with the Dutch Fiftiers, sharing their radical sense of poetic structure and subject. Later, in the 1960s and 1970s, Vinkenoog embraced many of the socially and artistically radical groups, including the Beats, becoming a sort of “guru” for many younger Dutch authors.

Do you still know how fresh the grass was?Do you still know how the leaves smell,that fall from the trees, as autumn approaches?Smell with me: there is a world behind your nosewhere the sun, even when it’s raining, provides entrywith the smell of a rose, or blowing a kiss,because all that smells, smells of life:Gestation Orgasm Death and around again.

Do you still know when you knew:yes, that’s how it is,this will always beand never has it beendifferent...Do you still know?Do you still know it?Do you still know, clearly?Do you still know:all you have ever experienced?Are you still finely tuned,on the edge of the abyssthat separates life from death,and not to forget: this is my way,and each way is different?

Are you still doing?Are you still just playing along?Do you let yourself be lived,or have you taken all power in your hands,being on the way: being yourself,in your own life?Have you found it?Do you still know,everything—everything that cuased paineverything you’d rather forgeteverything you ever thought of?

Clear. Obvious. Fixed. Certain,have you been able to hold onto it?Have you forgotten it already?Are you still searching?And me, I just babble on,question myself, on the grass,in the City Gardens,between sleeping Morroccans,cardplaying, chessplaying old people,courting ocuplesand a boy, who’s feeding the ducks...

I’m just sitting here,I’m opening the conversation.I smell the fresh grassand the smell of the first falling leaves.

Easing a bitresting a bit,doing a bit,but doing it:with conviction,because there is nothing elsebut what you’re doing now,not what you did yesterday, counts—not what you’ll do tomorrow,but how you feel her and now,touched, moved, or just dreaming a bit,about the wind whispering in the treetops,a locked-up dog, continuously barking,a peaceful moment in the City Gardens,my bike which falls overand a plane that makes a sight and sound-track...

And me, leaving behind the poem,written leaves, what it’s all about:Who still wants to change the world,if everything is changing?Who still wants to attack his neighborif that duck is already quacking that loud?